I received one of these letters and it sparked a huge argument between me and my ISP. I won - here's how:

I often work from home and have to download HUGE files (I'm a radiologist and an MRI set can be several gigabytes). Our hospital sets these files up on a server ready to be downloaded, and they get automatically downloaded throughout the day to the relevant radiologist working off site. The file formats are encrypted (for patient confidentiality) and the download software uses a version of BitTorrent, which in itself is a completely legitimate way of downloading large files.
I received a cease and desist letter from my ISP, which said they had evidence that I was downloading 'illegal' content. I argued that they couldn't possibly see what I was downloading as the files are encrypted (if they were looking somehow then they breached patient confidentiality), and in any case it was a perfectly legitimate reason for me to be downloading large BitTorrent files.
A few letters back and forth, including a statement from my place of work detailing the nature of these files and I received an apology from them and a letter stating that I would be taken off their 'watch' list.
I guess I can now go download 'illegal' torrents without worrying. I dont really do this much (I have Netlix, iTunes and not that much time to watch movies) other than for TV shows that have already aired on UK TV (I pay my TV license so that should cover it right?). Anyway, it's been 18 months and I've not had anymore complaints.

TL;DR: There are legal uses for BitTorrent and your ISP can't tell the difference.

you were forced to defend yourself and offer them an explanation of how you use the internet, and

provide proof from your employer,

and the end result is they said 'ok we're satisfied, we will stop threatening you and accusing you of illegal activity'. Am I understanding this right? I commend your loyalty in staying with them, it seems incredible to me that they can get away with this.

Ah well fair enough. I had no idea this kind of thing happened in the UK and am a bit surprised. In your case a request would not have been made by a copyright holder as no one would have evidence of your IP infringing, so it must have been at the ISP's discretion - and since BT and Talk Talk were still looking for legal clarification I'm surprised someone just decided to go ahead and accuse you. Would love to know the ISP :)

Whilst in this situation your employer pays for your internet this makes it some what more acceptable in providing proof.
However it is still a horrible guilty until proven innocent system and not acceptable at all. If this man paid for his own internet he has been accused of something he hasn't done, then asked to provide some form of proof to show he is innocent. This is basic western civilisation law, you have to prove he has done something wrong rather than the other way around.

It was some letters back and forth. It never reached a court of law. You may not like it but "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't prevent a company from requesting that you cease and desist something they don't like.

You are, of course, free to ignore that company's request until it escalates to a trial, and then defend yourself as innocent until proven guilty.

Yes, I am far more pro business than 99.9%+ of reddit as you can see by my posting history but it is not for companies to pry into peoples private business. As far as im concerned an ISP is an ISP, they are not there to spy on what you're doing unless prompted or if you're using the internet for reasons like terrorism or child rape.

Listen, don't be getting annoyed with the ISPs because they don't care about your illegal downloading, it is the government forcing them to do this. If they don't then they will get in trouble. That is why many ISPs object to the government's enforcements.

What can people tell me about netflix and lovefilm, are they a viable and workable solution to convincing people to pay a bit for content rather than torrenting? If not, surely a steam-like platform where films and tv can be paid for and downloaded at reasonable & attractive prices. Set the general price lower and the customer base would surely grow massively?

Sadly no. It's painfully difficult to actually give these companies your money for their product sometimes. Theoatmeal made a brilliant, brilliant comic showing an example of this: I tried to watch Game of thrones

Those services would work much better if publishers actually let them have the rights to distribute content. Systems like a "Steam for movies" will only work when the media industry stops being a broken old dinosaur and copyright laws get fixed.

It's cool that it still works, several years after they started blocking UK visitors. You just know that the tech team could easily prevent such a straightforward thing from letting us bypass their restrictions, but they haven't bothered to do so. I get the feeling that the powerful people who demand these restrictions on content don't really reflect the wishes of the rest of the people involved in the process.

Irish guy here and I'm currently on an 'unlimited usage' Internet service. Of course, when you look at the small print, it says something along the lines of 'unlimited, within reason.'

When I was setting up my account with this ISP (Wimax), I decided to ask the guy over the phone what the actual d/l limit was; it took a bit of poking and prodding but he eventually told me that the download limit was as low as 10gigs per month.

It should be completely illegal to adverise an Internet service as having 'unlimited' usage, when it is anything but.

I'm with Virgin Media, their "Fair use" policy is to reduce my speed by 75% if I download more than 1.5GB between 4 and 9 PM, every day. Since we're four students in the house, this runs out very quickly.

Oh, and they limit torrents by default during the day, until midnight.

Its easy to pick on virgin, but they are just ensuring everyone gets a decent connection during the day. Personally, I don't see this as a issue if it means I can online game without huge lag from torrent users. Besides, you can rinse it rotten overnight, Which is a a lot of data over a 30meg connection.

Common practice with U.S. mobile data plans. T-Mobile and AT&T both sell unlimited plans then throttle to uselessness after around 3-5 gigs. They even have the audacity to announce when the cap on 'unlimited' is raised.

I like the service that Netflix gives, but while ridiculous licensing restraints limit them so badly in what they can offer me, there's no chance it's replacing piracy.

For example: I took out the one month trial from Netflix, and started watching an American TV show. I burned through the first three seasons in no time, and was primed to start the fourth when I realised that was it. The show is halfway through it's fifth season on US TV as we speak, yet licensing prevents me even being able to watch the old season on Netflix. Illegal sites will let me watch shows moments after they air (or as they air, in some places) - why would I want to pay to give that up?

I would gladly pay, believe me. I essentially do already by paying for my Usenet access, which costs more than a Netflix/Lovefilm subscription. If all the major content providers can get together and pull each other's heads out of their asses, I will ball my money up in a big sack and throw it at them across the Atlantic, but until then I'll just keep using the infinitely superior service that pirates give me.

Netflix is good, but the way they licence content can make for some strange anomalies. I can't remember off the top of my head which particular shows this applied to, but when it launched over here, two shows had the complete run - all the episodes. Within a week, they'd been reduced to four seasons each.

I use the new UK netflix service. It needs more titles but there's a fairly broad selection and quality of most titles is good. Some foreign titles are substandard quality, though, and all foreign films are subbed (no dubs).

I have an unlimited plan on 'be' and dl well over 150Gb a month. Never had a problem.

Exactly. Torrents are a very efficient and cheap way to distribute data, legal or not. You don't have to run a server and pay for all the bandwidth if you simply seed a hundred or so copies of the updated files and then let the users distribute it for you.

I dont really do this much (I have Netlix, iTunes and not that much time to watch movies) other than for TV shows that have already aired on UK TV (I pay my TV license so that should cover it right?). Anyway, it's been 18 months and I've not had anymore complaints.

It depends where you "source" said content from. Take Top Gear for example. Your TV licence allows you to watch the programme live as it's transmitted, Sunday night, via your TV / streaming via the iPlayer website.

You can stream / download said programme from iPlayer for the next seven days, without the need to have a TV licence [That's what I do, and before anyone starts, I've got a letter from the head of TV licencing saying exactly that, after I complained about being called a "Criminal" by one of their phone operatives.]

However If you download last nights episode of Top Gear from a torrent website? Then you're in breach of copyright violation.

No, it was a letter stating a list of torrent files I had downloaded, their sizes and my IP static IP address. They assumed they were illegal for some reason and asked me to stop. There was no mention of RIAA or MPAA, it came directly from the ISP.
I have a business connection so my usage is not restricted.

"The Act will mean ISPs will have to send warning letters to alleged illegal file downloaders, as well as potentially cutting users off."

The part of the bill I really take issue with is that it requires ISPs to act off allegations rather than evidence. A company only has to allege that a user is breaching their copyright and the ISP is required to send a warning. Multiple warnings, and the ISP is required to throttle bandwidth or cut the user off. No evidence, no judicial process. Entirely open to abuse.

Can someone please get their story straight? The creative industry continues to grow. IPI and BSA state that potential jobs are lost. Not actual jobs lost. Now it's "People are losing jobs"?

Will someone in a damn court of law, or politics, do some fact checking. Because the whole creative industry just keeps bombarding us with nothing more than their own words about how they want more money.

That's what I find most insane. They now have a ruling that forces the ISP's to disconnect their customers and lose revenue in order to protect another industries profits. Seriously, WTF? If someone is violating your copyright to an extent that you feel is hurting your business, you fucking sue them! Oh wait, so many people are doing it that you can't sue them all, guess what, you have a failed business model. If you don’t want your stuff to be pirated, don’t ever show it to anyone, that’s the only way to make sure. In this day and age, it’s insane to believe that you can make something available to millions of people and then control what they do with it.

This is like the entertainment industry bitching and moaning because something they used to sell for hugely inflated margins, in perpetuity, is now freely available to be picked up off the ground by anyone who cares to do it. It doesn't really matter if it's illegal to pick it up or even immoral to do so, it's there and people are going to pick it up. That is the reality of the situation and if I've learned anything over my lifetime, it's that reality will always trump laws and morals.

They are trying to fight basic human behavior. The desire to share our ideas, thoughts, and culture with each other is built into our DNA. It's one of the primary reasons we are the dominate species on this planet. Santorum has a better chance of convincing the majority of Americans that fucking for fun is immoral as the government of any country has of convincing their populations that sharing music, books, movies, in other words, culture, with each other is somehow wrong.

I have worked with techies high up the chain of banking institutions and government institutions that simply dismiss Linux as something "not serious" and live in a Windows-only world. Their vendors would give a kidney for one of these guys.

MS were not really opposed to open source in any real way, most of it was just bullshit soap boxing for the sake of investors from the higher ups of MS - ironically much like what publishers do with DRM and piracy - they know it is BS, but it keeps investors happy and stock prices up to be seen to fighting it.

All the while they were supporting and contributing to the open standards for both hardware and software that set the standards today.

It really is a case of what they (the execs) said, vs what they (the actual software engineers and project leads) did.

I remember OpenGL becoming a bogged down horrible to use PoS, kowtowing to industry backwards compatibility (mostly for the sake of CAD industry) and becoming a bloated and horrible monstrosity. One that even John Carmack champion of all things openGL even admitted.

OpenGL was a mess of bad management, that the Khronos Group only made worse when they were instead supposed to be taking it forwards.

Microsoft on the other hand focused on improving their product, even going so far as to redesign it from the ground up to remove all the baggage of backward compatibility with DX10/11 - they also made excellent tools and libraries available, as well as excellent documentation and support.

Now DX is leading the charge and OpenGL is limping along behind it.

I'd love if openGL would sort it's act out and become a contender, but I doubt it will.*

*Edit: Actually I take that back, they very well might make a come back in the mobile space which will then translate to desktop success, and their documentation has improved (from the quick glance I just took).

There was in actual fact a court case about this in France, something about Google Maps (Free) coming up as a top result on Google when looking for Maps as opposed to some companies Pay for maps. Granted I dont think Google maps is open source but it is free.

Even if jobs are lost in creative industry isn't that what should happen?

When cars were invented horse breeding industry got in trouble. When electronic calculator was invented slide rule manufacturers went out of business. Why should creative industry be any different?

Another thing is do we even want big creative industry? Wouldn't bigger scientific community or more farming make world better place? Of course we need entertainment but is it really worth all these laws and costs focusing protecting it? I am quite sure entertainment will survive without any protection. After all it has survived when laws have tried to actively kill it.

Cutting people off from any important media should be a human rights violation. Just like you can't legally prohibit people from sending in letters to newspapers or publishing scientific studies.

This is actually why the UN has been working on declaring internet access a human right, by the way. A lot of people, probably including a lot of you, were opposed to that because of the insane and incorrect notion that it would force the government to start subsidizing internet subscriptions. Which is completely false, and obviously so when you read so much as the abstract of the proposal.

Just an important reminder for you all to support these initiatives in whatever form they occur.

Yeah, I do actually think language to that extent was adopted at some point—I don't remember the details, but I remember reading about it—but not in any form that's enforceable or has any practical value. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The French parliament still passed HADOPI, Ireland's working hard to implement the same thing, and here we are talking about the UK joining that club.

Do you understand that just because there is some success, it doesn't preclude the notion that they are still being held back at some level?

For example: perhaps if they were named something less juvenile they'd have won 5 seats in European Parliament, or be polling at 18% nationally.

If I made a political party called the "Poop Eating Party" and someone said "That name will prevent you from real, proper success", I could point to the fact that we have 6% support and dismiss the argument that the name is damaging.

I agree. I think the reason they're getting votes is they're appealing to a demographic that's tired with the way things are currently ran. If they adjusted themselves they would not longer appeal to that demographic.

Fuck's sake, sometimes I forgot that there's a whole world full of scared, business-orientated cunts that live and prosper outside the realm of my own personal existence. I don't have a single friend that wouldn't say, after a brief explanation of the situation, the internet access was not an inherent human right.

It's like how you forget mental republicans exist in the US until they get a bit of global media coverage. Honestly, it's just depressing really.

This is the difficulty of society. We live inside the influences of our bubbles, and we're always in bubbles. Just as you look around with your friends and feel like you see only reasonable people, so does Rick Santorum. When he looks on his television screen and watches a liberal discussion, they seem completely out of touch with reality. He hasn't met these people, and when he has his respect level has been low because they are outside his bubble.

The nice thing about the bubble analogy is that you can pop bubbles. And when bubbles pop, your opinions change. Knowledge is like a needle, while bubbles are hard to grow.

The power of the the internet is how quickly it can spread knowledge, and controlling the internet means controlling the knowledge.

Of course, there is an easy plan to fix all of this.

--censored-- google thought & privacy violation #411.234 --censored--

So there it is. A fool proof way to assure a free and open internet for everyone.

"In the Internet Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. Wikileaks who investigate crime and Anonymous who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

Makes me want to release a video of me shitting on the constitution, then charge a hundred billion dollars for it, then sue ISP's once I see it on a torrent site and claim it cost me 500 quadrillion dollars.

You just caused an interesting thought to pop into my head. If a lawyer stood up in court and for his closing argument, whistled Happy Birthday, wouldn't that be considered some kind of public performance? Hell, he's even being paid to be there so couldn't whoever holds that copyright go after him? It might be a good way to show the absurdity that is going on in this arena.

Yeah. If big media companies are going to act like children (a-la youtube) and make the ISPs / government foot the bill to investigate them, then this is them most idiotic thing possible.

Just like in the MegaUpload case, the big companies all had direct access to MU's servers, allowing them to find and delete files for YEARS before they decided they wanted Kim's head. At the very least, they should have to prove wrongdoing through their own investigation before accusing.

Yeah it's so clear. Why should media companies foot the expense themselves, when they can make our government enforce laws meaning ISPs have the job of warning people and compiling lists of offenders for the media companies. All about money, and not for the artists. So depressing..

Record Companies have never been about the music. They're just like any other massive company; exploiting what they have for as much as they can as quickly as possible.

The difference really, is that before all this Piracy fiasco, lobbying was only apparent to those involved. Oil companies paying off x y z politician doesn't really become visible to the public. Watching the US / NZ / British / etc governments railroad people for bogus charges relating to piracy, however, is something that the everyman can relate to, so now it's deadly apparent what's actually going on.

In the end, it's all pointless anyway. Napster, Kazaa, emule, download sites, even torrents and usenet are all low hanging fruit. They all require the file to be available on someone's machine, in an identifiable way which makes them easy to go after legally. Shut them all down tomorrow, and they might feel good about themselves and convince themselves that the good times are going to just keep on going and they might be right, for about a year or two.

Think about what their product is in digital form. It's a string of 1's and 0's that when interpreted by software, turns into their product. Another way to interpret that string of 1's and 0's is as a binary number. Often a hugely inconceivably large number, but a number just the same.

01100100 = 100 Lets say that represents a movie. How many ways can you think of, just off the top of your head, to split that up and distribute it online? If you make the chunks small enough, no single part could be considered to be infringement. This is what's coming if they succeed in making torrents and other sources too dangerous to use anymore; a system where the only place any infringement is going to be identifiable is on the downloader’s computer. Will they then start pushing for home to home searches of people’s PC’s? Will they demand that everyone with internet access allow random scans of their computer to make sure there is no infringing material on any of the hard drives? At some point, even regular people who don’t know a file from an fork will decide that enough is enough. Personally, I think we are just about there already.

I put up a counter-claim and the claim got removed pretty quickly, but it's ridiculous that companies are just blanketing up complaints and then getting money from ads displayed from people that don't counter-claim.

It's like a proxy server, the data is encrypted before being sent forwarded to a third party server (the VPN provider) then unencrypted and forwarded to the final destination. The final destination (and anybody listening to unencrypted traffic sent from the third party server) sees only the third party's IP address. Therfore my IP is not broadcast and packets can't be traced back to me.

It just makes it easier for copyright holders to get your information if you've had a lot of complaints made against you from other copyright holders; so they can use that information if they want to take someone to court over the copyright infringement.

I doubt the courts would revoke your access to internet, I thought that sort of stuff only happens when you hack into military systems or other super serious crimes.

That's because it's only the "initial obligations code" which allows the sending of letters and the collection of personal information and statistics of people accused of infringing. Technical obligations have to be provided by the secretary of state, and there is a £250,000 fine for ISPs who don't comply.

A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against some or all relevant subscribers to its service for the purpose of preventing or reducing infringement of copyright by means of the internet.

A “technical measure” is a measure that—

(a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber;

(b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use;

I believe the law requires all ISP's to implement these measures, it was just BT and TalkTalk who took this to court. I can not imagine how companies like 02 and Be could monitor this though considering their small size.

I think there's a big misunderstanding by people about this code, ISPs will not be monitoring your connection.

Before now, complaints could be made to your ISP and they could ignore the complaint and then not bother informing you that they received it.

The new code of practice states that the big ISPs will have to inform you they received a complaint, and then put the complaint into a collective database with the other ISPs. If you have enough complaints made against you (3 in one year), copyright holders can then apply to get your personal information from the ISPs for use in court if they wish to pursue things further.

All this ends up being is a big automated database where copyright holders can make complaints to, and it'll mean a letter will be automatically printed and sent to you if you get a complaint. It's hardly a massive undertaking for these massive companies.

I'm getting really sick of the copyright holder's argument that piracy costs them $X per year. That's not revenue, most of the people who are bothering to pirate their work wouldn't bother paying for it at the price they're selling it for anyway. Hence why they pirate. Now if they went the way of Steam, with huge sales, maybe they could increase their profits.

I don't think so. From the case of the Daily Variety vs the Vandals, it's pretty obvious that the lawyers have convinced the company to lose tons of money (to pay for the lawyers) to fight a battle they will almost certainly lose.

Same story in Leeds and if you ring them about it they tell you essential maintenance is being preformed between two dates which always move further and further back. Been like that for the 3 years ive been with them. Problem is they are the only company I know that do 9 month plans for students so im stuck with them.

I imagine the way they'll tell if a file is illegal is that someone from the "creative industry" will tell them it is, without much actual evidence. And unfortunately "creative industry" probably means companies that exploit creative people, rather than anyone who actually creates anything.

Virgin Media are not part of the Virgin empire. They pay royalties to Branson to be able to keep using his brand.

edit: This may be horseshit, most of what i say is. I remembered reading something to this effect, but the news stories i can find suggest that while the Carlyle Group did bid for Virgin Media, it doesn't look like it went through.

Christine Payne, general secretary of the Actors' union Equity, called on the ISPs to "stop fighting and start obeying the law".
"Once again the court is on the side of the almost two million workers in the creative industries whose livelihoods are put at risk because creative content is stolen on a daily basis," she said.

She's talking about actors. Actors!
Like Johnny Depp's livelihood is at risk if he gets less than $25million for about 3 months work.

NO ONE other than maybe the most maliciously abusive/criminal hackers should ever be "cut off" from the internet. IMO doing so should be considered a violation of human rights. As long as they pay their bills, there should never be a reason to cut people off like that.

The internet isn't just a service these days, it's an essential part of daily life. Almost as important for education, work, and communication, as water is for life. It wasn't always this important, but as society continues into the future, this becomes only more and more true.

Cutting people off, for what amounts to nothing more than mere accusations of "copyright infringement", without proof or even a fair trial before hand, is monstrously absurd. Even at it's worst, it is not a violent crime, it's a civil one between a person and a corporation.

I can't think of any similar issue/service where the service would be cut off, for unrelated activities..

On top of things, they often aren't just cut off from their ISP, they're blacklisted by many ISPs or root providers.

My family was almost permanently cut off from the internet, for something none of us did, possibly because someone was using our wifi. They cut off our internet, and wouldn't let us back on, nor would any other provider, as they had added us to some blacklist. All without proof of anything, other than an accusation from some corporate lawyer group. It finally took us mailing our state representative and the possibility of us pursuing further legal action, before they let us back online.

We wouldn't even consider ourselves high-end users, other than the bandwidth used for a Steam account. And I don't download anything these days other than legitimately purchased files/games..

I cannot express how utterly angry disconnection policies make me, no one should have to go through that.. Especially considering how frequently this happens, how oftenly incorrect it is, and without any fair due process.

It is simply wrong in this technology age.. We should be progressing towards a day when every single human being on the planet is connected to the global network, at the cost of a basic utility or close to free. Not moving towards more censorship, harming many for the sake of the copyright of a few, and disconnecting people. -_-

That's why you buy your own VPS overseas and use that for all your torrenting needs. I've done it for a year now and never looked back for $12 a month. Gigabit connection means you download any file in minutes and can belong to any private torrent site and easily keep your ratio at 10:1. Then SFTP your files to your computer.

Some Canadian ISPs have been doing this for a while, though they send warning letters, in the end they won't do a damn thing. I've received two of those letters from my previous ISP, a friend of mine got 10. Some ISPs, even Bell don't bother.

This happened in my country, New Zealand. I keep blatantly pirating because just to see if I will get a warning letter. Warning letters have nearly exclusively been received by people downloading big music artists, namely Rihanna and Lady Gaga. I download about 100 gig a month straight from tpb.

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.